Advantages

Disadvantages

"No video calling"

Bought mine for £125 on 3-to-go (half-price in May'03). Was amazed to find 2 batteries, & SHOCKED to see a 32 MB memory card. (Most digital cameras come with only 16!) The INTERFACE is more than acceptable, with the middle top button bringing up a sub-menu for almost everything. Haven't used all features yet, but plan to connect to my PC within a couple of days. The only downside is not having video calling, but the other features easily make it better than the NEC models offered by 3. However, the "DETACHABLE" CAMERA is one of the weirdest things I have ever seen! Who gave Motorola the idea of having a detachable camera which is actually bigger than the original phone? I thought it would be a small thing as a usual detachable camera for mobiles. Took a few PICTURES & a VIDEO CLIP but have not yet tried them on my PC for printing etc. While viewing a saved picture, the middle top button gives a small menu which offers different options for the picture, including copying it to the phone, setting it as background or screen-saver etc. Why copy it to the phone? Because a connected computer does not read the memory card directly from the phone (a bit naughty of Motorola!). However, I think that an investment of around £10 for a card reader will be money well spent if you want to use the phone as a part-time digital camera and an MP3 PLAYER. I am thinking of buying a bigger card (128 or 256MB), copy over a few MP3 songs (maybe up to 50) and play it on my car stereo through a CD-cassette adapter. But before this, I'll arrange for a car-charger as well, because I assume this operation will swallow battery power. The CALENDAR is just fine although it could've been better with a weekly view. This is very annoying especially when Motorola have mentioned the possibility of having a weekly view (with all events in the week showing). One of my very ancient Nokias (6150) has an option to "View All" calendar en tries. This displays all events with dates (in chronological order) without needing to scroll through months or weeks. So A830 is a bit left behind here! 3's attractive RATE of 10p/min anytime to land-lines is NOT available everywhere in the UK. Apart from most places in the major cities, 3 borrows O2's network (2G or 2.5G appears instead of 3G in the display) and for this, they charge 15p/minute. Apart from this, 25p/min to other mobiles and 10p/text message match other pay-as-you-go tariffs. One advantage, however, is that no vouchers or top-up-cards are needed. Calls made during a month are charged by direct debit which means that you will never be left stranded creditless. In a nutshell, so far, so good. I am more than happy to switch from my (Nokia) 3510i to A380. Let's see what happens in the world of 3!